Invasive Rage

Eurasian doves, wild anger, and women

Do animals get angry? Do they rage? I’ve often wondered about this, especially when I consider my distaste for the introduced Eurasian doves in my neighborhood. They look so sweet and beautiful until they are fighting anything and everything that they see as invading their territory. And they truly believe they can win any battle.

“Fighting is risky in the state of nature because injuries are often fatal when there’s no paramedic to patch you up. The animal brain is skilled at sizing up its adversary. It only attacks when it expects to win, or when there is no possibility of escape.” According to Loretta G. Breuning Ph.D. in her article Animal Anger: An evolutionary approach to anger surges and relief published in Psychology Today in May 2017.

But what if an animal always expects to win. Eurasian doves are introduced to North America and they don’t have the acquired genetics to know when they can or cannot win with certain adversaries. And what some people might find admirable, I find deplorable. Aggression is not a tool allowed to me in modern society.

My rage has no place in a natural world where men are stronger and more powerful sociologically than I am. Fight or flight is almost flight for a woman, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel rage; there’s just no place to put it. I wonder what it would be like to be allowed to be angry and more than that to be allowed to express rage. The potential is so frightening that I don’t even want to rage in private, because what if it slips out publicly? I already know no one will protect me. I already know I’ll be completely dismissed and no opinion I have after will matter.

I was a teenager and in early my 20s before the Violence Against Women Act had been passed. I had already raged at a live-in boyfriend, confronting him with the other girlfriend and the result was being grabbed by my neck and strangled in a public place. The other girlfriend was heartbroken, because he obviously loved me more than he ever admitted or he wouldn’t have grabbed me by the throat.

And I was just lucky it happened in public because even though no one was going to stand against it, it’s still bad form to kill a woman with witnesses outside of another woman who would be happy if she was dead.

I have always understood that being angry could get me killed, even if my anger was entirely justified.

This was made apparent several years later when I was stalked by a next-door neighbor who would pound on my front door in the middle of the night or jump over the wall in the back patios that adjoined our condos and pound on my bedroom window. I heard him fire guns once. I called the police three times begging for help, and the fourth time, sleep deprived and having already asked the owners of both condos to help with no result, I raged at them. That was a mistake.

They didn’t respond to any calls after, at least not until my neighbor walked through my front door and pointed a loaded pistol at my baby half-brother. My brother was only 18. And even our mom didn’t care what was happening to me until the boy in the family was in danger. That mattered.

The police busted down my neighbor’s door and tackled him in the shower. Then they found a myriad of guns, a flak jacket, and a pistol with a round in the chamber — the pistol that was pointed at my brother.

I don’t think my dad could understand what exactly was happening to me, even though he owned the condo I was renting. It was my rage that shut everyone down. My rage was simply dismissed as female hysteria until a young man almost lost his life.

I didn’t mean to do this to my brother, but it probably saved my life. I invited him to go to the San Diego Comicon with me because I was working for Image Comics and could make introductions. He didn’t need them. He’s famous now in his own right, but the people who wouldn’t listen to me hadn’t been enraged by my stalker pointing a loaded gun at him, I might very well be dead.

I made the mistake of being angry about what was happening to me. My anger, while justified, meant that the police officers rolled their eyes and dismissed me. It’s unacceptable for women to be angry and troublesome, especially when they live alone.

“The animal brain only responds to threats that it can see, hear or smell. It does not imagine potential future threats the way the human brain can. We humans can activate threat signals internally without relying on external inputs. This ability has helped us survive by imagining the winter cold in time to stockpile wood in the summer. But it can also leave us with a lot of anger,” according to Bruening.

I am manipulative because I’m not allowed to be angry. Men gain influence being angry. Women lose influence according to a 2015 Study published in Science Daily. I’m not proud of being manipulative, groveling and ingratiating myself to be taken seriously. In fact, I’m ashamed of it. But it’s the only path that has ever been effective for me and the dismissals for women’s opinions are hard and fast these days. I don’t know what else to do. And I don’t know what to do with a rage built on 55 years of not being protected and not being safe and still not knowing what to do.

I wish I was a Eurasian dove. They don’t anticipate their death by hubris. I have seen them hit by cars and taken by hawks because they are so certain in their invulnerability. I wish I knew what it felt like to believe I was invulnerable.

Maybe rage has a place in nature, but it is not a place that afforded to human women.